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3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2024–2026
0:31 · 12K views · Nov 12, 2008
A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.
Cited as a clever precedent whenever export controls on powerful computing hardware or AI models are discussed.
3 comments from Hacker News
Ah, now I see my mistake; I gave a list of what I see as things of political importance without making it clear this is what I was doing. That the source code for unbreakable encryption fits onto a T-shirt made it clear to the US government that it was a "speech" issue, and also made it clear that it was in any practical sense unstoppable. That big models can't fit onto most person devices at present is indeed likely to be a temporary state of affairs, however it does also mean that the political aspect is very different — the senators and members of parliament can't look at the thing and notice that, even if the symbols are arcane and mysterious beyond their education, it's fundamentally quite short and simple. And, of course, if they're planning legislation, they can easily say "no phones with ${feature} > ${threshold}", which they've already done on various compute hardware over the years, even if the thresholds seem quaint today: this video Politicians don't care if all of us here think they look silly. > 2) Claiming that the benefit of people being able to run the models locally is only 5% is absurd. The privacy benefit of not sending your sensitive data to a third party is worth more than that by itself, much less setting up some huge institutions to have an oligopoly over the technology and subject everyone to all the abuses inherent in uncompetitive markets. This seems a surprising claim, given the popularity of cloud compute, Cloudfare, third-party tracking cookies, Dro
Normally dual use means it has a possible use as a weapon. Compute power is restricted from export to enemy nations and is considered dual use. There was once a moment when a Mac had enough computing power that it was prohibited from export during a few months until the new limit was established, which was cleverly used as an ad: this video But in this specific case it’s utter clickbait. Dual use: [LINK]
A company with different taste would redo that apple ad from the Power Mac era: “this model has been classified a munition”. this video